Category: Multiplayer

Redfall

Redfall is the newest game from Arkane Studios, best known for Prey and Dishonored. It’s their attempt at making a horde shooter/looter shooter, and I have thoughts about it.

Lmao got em.

They are “This is terrible,” and, “Why does this exist?” If you told me Redfall came out 10 years ago, I would have believed you.

The first bad sign is the gunplay. It is not great. The aiming is tight, but the feedback from shooting and recoil is awful. Every enemy feels like a bullet sponge. Only two weapons feel right: the shotgun and sniper rifle. And both of those require headshots. While sloppy guns might be okay in other types of games, this is a horde shooter… it relies on its gunplay.

In addition, there’s apparently no party scaling. So regardless of if you want to play in “single player” where you can’t pause, or with an actual team, it’s the same experience. In fact, you can never pause the game, so I hope nothing ever happens while you’re playing that might interrupt you, or you’ll die.

The graphics are okay, and have a cartoony aesthetic, but the movement animations are all the same. Each special type of vampire feels pretty much the same.

For example there’s one called Angler. Much like L4D’s Smoker, they have a grapple to reel you in with. But as far as I can tell, you they don’t have an obvious tell or signal. The ability is on a 20 second cooldown, and you need to just dodge it based on the timing, and circle strafe.

Redfall could be redeemed by its story, but even after just seeing the opening, I have low hopes. The opening is incredibly stupid. The game opens with two vampires alive in front of the player character. The player has no guns or anything, and can only watch as the vampires turn another unlucky human into a buffet. Suddenly, one of the vampires notices you’re alive, and turns to deal with you.

Then the most predictable thing to happen in the history the earth, happens. The thing that happens every day, and will happen every day for 7 million years after I die occurs: the sun the comes up.

Which makes the vampires run away. Not die or anything. Just… run away. Because I guess they didn’t have sunscreen on. On the boat that we’re on. Because the game starts on a boat.

Once you get off the boat, and go out to face your first enemy, things don’t get better. I chose to go full sneaky commando, because I selected the hardest difficultly I have available. I was prepped to deal with these bloodsuckin motherfuckin vampires, but the first enemy I ran into was actually a cultist.

Here’s the thing though: apparently the children of the children of the night are deaf, because they can’t tell if someone straight ass sprints at them at full speed from behind. For some reason the game doesn’t have an assassination animation or anything; you just thwack them in the back of the head and they fall down dead.

There are some signs that this was made by Arkane, of course. There are a bunch of interactable objects, common in the immersive sim genre, but unlike actual immersive sims (and any game from last 10 years) you can’t actually do interesting things with them. For example, there are more oil spills in the environments than the gulf of Mexico, but you can’t throw gas canisters at enemies, you can only shoot the canisters when enemies walk by.

Some other things that suck:
1. The quippy dialogue. It made me want to root for the vampires.
2. The enemy AI. Maybe it got copied from Fallout 76, and then made worse, somehow. A non-zero portion of the time enemies don’t do anything, and just stand still. The rest of the time enemies wander toward you like geriatric hobos.
3.The questing loop. There seem to be 2-3 options for each mission: i.e. go in guns blazing, sneak in, or sneak in with lockpicks or electric lockpicks via hacking. These are your only options.
4. An open world made out of absolutely nothing between the points of interest. Every other mile has one to two enemies. Apparently everyone thinks you’re a Mormon missionary, because no one will come within six miles of you.

Why make an open world game if it’s all empty? Just give us a mission select. It was good enough for Doom, it can be good enough for you.

Maybe the game would get better if I played another 7 hours. Here’s the thing: I played 7 hours. That’s enough time to watch the entire Lord Rings Trilogy. There are other games that are better, sooner. I’m not continuing to smack myself in the nuts for another full workday to see if it gets fun.

If you want a better horde shooter, go play Back 4 Blood. And I’ll see you on the servers, because I’m the only other person that likes it. But I can’t stomach another minute of Redfall.

If, for some reason, you want to play Redfall, you could buy it with money. Or you could get a game pass subscription, so that after you uninstall, you can go play something good instead.

Pokémon Scarlet

When I was in highschool, I had to write essays. These essays were graded on a rubric with a certain percentage of points for various categories. One of these categories was what could be considered writing “technical skills.” Things like grammar, sentence construction, and spelling mistakes as a whole contributed to about 20% of the essay’s grade.

As a result, I would never get higher than 80%, because regardless of how good any of my points, ideas, or concepts were, my writing was a complete technical failure.

In that respect, my high school essays have a lot in common with Pokémon Scarlet and Violet.

The Worst Performing Switch Game I’ve Ever Seen

Pokémon Violet’s miserable technical performance is omnipresent across the entire game. Miserable pop-in, levels of detail so low that you can see polygons getting added onto character models, poor framerates, and slowdown are present in virtual every area of the game. Almost every object is also subject to animation-frame culling as well.

My personal breaking point for this was the game’s credit sequence. This game is so unbelievably scuffed from a technical level that it fails to smoothly display scrolling text on a screen.

I’m not going to harp on the technical problems of Violet after this paragraph, except for when they become relevant to other portions of the game. Games are made up of multiple components, and worked on by multiple teams.

Some teams did their job very well. Some of these teams may have done the best they could under extreme time pressure. Or maybe they’re just incompetent! I don’t know which one it was. My conclusion is the same.

Despite liking and enjoying Pokémon Violet, the game’s technical issues are so widely spread that I just can’t recommend the game.

Core Mechanics

I did a large writeup on Pokémon as a series a while back. If you’re not familiar with Pokémon games at all, I suggest you read that writeup before the next bit. It included a overview of structure the games follow, along with general coverage of the series’ mechanics, and some suggestions for where a new player could start.

Scarlet and Violet mark the series transition to a full open world from the previous linear routes and narrative path. Instead, the world is shaped like a large donut. Difficulty scales as you travel up either side of the donut, with the game’s finale taking place in the center.

In Legends: Arceus, the battle and catching system was very simple. In Scarlet and Violet, those systems have been rolled back to their more complex previous forms, and are still very good and very compelling. There’s no more tall grass. Instead Pokémon spawn into the world in packs, and running into them will start a battle.

Node-Based Story Structure

The story structure is also fairly different. Because of the game’s open world nature, there’s no single series of events, or path that’s really required. Instead, each story event is sort of a self-contained mini-event. There are three main routes for these events. Two routes have 5 events, and the gym route has 8.

I think these story nodes can be completed in pretty much any order. I’m not sure that’s the case, though, because I did all the ones that gave me travel upgrades first. It certainly didn’t feel like there was a required order to me.

That said, these events don’t dynamically scale. I left what could be considered the 2nd or 3rd gym fight to do last one. There’s something amusing about showing up with a team of level 60 Pokémon for a gym battle against level 25s. But it’s also a little disappointing that the game doesn’t utilize the nonlinear story structure to give different players a different experience based on the order they complete story battles.

Also, before I switch topics, the games story arcs are surprisingly good. From a purely story standpoint, Scarlet might be my favorite Pokémon game. Is it the greatest story ever? No, but it’s memorable and unique.

Thematically Vast, Visually Bland

The Paldea region is one of the areas where the game feels like it’s been held back by the technology. There’s an early moment where a character is supposed to be introducing the stunning majesty of the Paldea region, and we get treated to a set of panning views of… various green-grey plains.

It’s sort of sad-funny that sets the tone for what we’ll see in the rest of the game.

The game has a variety of areas, but outside of Pokémon variety, the areas never felt different. Looking back, I remember dry desserts, a large cave, some icy mountains, ocean-side towns, and a coal mine, but they all felt identical. The only area that left any sort of impact was a large cave that I wandered into under leveled, swiftly got pulped, and then booked it out of.

The Pokémon Cave Experience

I think the biggest issue is that Pokémon games have often been light on visuals. Instead, the tone of the zones was sold by the Pokémon themselves. Caves full of Zubats spring to mind. Lunatone and Solrock in Meteor Falls, or Skarmory in the ash covered zones.

However, because of how Pokémon spawning works, and the fact that it’s possible to ignore pretty much every encounter I didn’t want to fight, most areas ended up feeling empty. I could rush through them, and interact with nothing but story events if I so chose.

Some thoughts that don’t fit anywhere else

Pokémon is a broad franchise, and has its own subtypes of players just like other complicated and broad games. As such, there are some things I can’t comment on. I don’t know how well the game is balanced and plays for multiplayer activities, such as competitive tourneys, or the end-game raids. I also didn’t do much with the breeding post-game/shiny hunting.

Many of the gyms in this game have their own mini-game or side mode associated with them. One of the more standout moments for me was a game mode where you’re supposed to collect Sunflora, and bring them back to a central area. This puzzle was very clearly designed before being tested, because it required collecting such a large number of Sunflora, that they would lag the game, and pop-in if you ran too far ahead of them. The town with this gym challenge also had a windmill that had ridiculous animation culling. Both of these combined to make the whole area incredibly immersion-breaking.

The new Pokémon designs generally felt quite good, as did much of the general world design and writing. The Jiggypuff with sharp teeth that screams and bites you is one of my favorites.

Again, though, it’s things like the carefully crafted in-world advertisements and logos that end up feeling like they’re in sharp contrast to the generally poor technical quality of the rest of the game.

Friendly reminder that the Fairy Pokémon type is based off old-english fairies, and those things were public menaces.

The vengeful fairy with a giant hammer that just beats the shit out of you is also great.

In Conclusion

Pokémon Scarlet is a 7/10, but it gets that score, much like my high school English papers, for a sheer lack of technical polish.

If this was an indie game, I’d excuse a lot of these issues. But this is the largest media franchise in the world. Yes, Scarlet makes makes changes in story, structure, and world, but they’re all hindered by those technical issues.

There have been some rumors that Nintendo/Gamefreak are working on patches to improve performance, but I’m not holding my breath. And I’m not betting on these issues being fixed for the next game either.

Did I have fun? Yes! Would I play it again? Probably. Will I buy the next entry in the franchise? In the immortal words of Penny Arcade’s Tycho Brahe, “I am a consumer whore.”

Of course I will.

But I don’t recommend you buy it.

PAX Unplugged – Mythic Mischief and Klask

Mythic Mischief and Klask don’t really have anything in common with each other. It’s not even like they had booths next to each other or something. Mythic Mischief is an action economy and movement-based game with victory points that almost reminds me of Chess. Klask is a skill-based dexterity game that feels like miniature air hockey.

So why am I covering them together? Because I don’t have enough to say about them separately to fill writeup! Anyway, let’s get to it.

Mythic Mischief

Mythic Mischief is an asymmetric grid-based movement game, designed by Max Anderson, Zac Dixon, Austin Harrison, and published by IV Games.

The best summary I can offer is that you and your opponents both control 3 miniatures on a 5v5 grid. Alternating turns, you attempt to spend your actions and use your abilities to place your opponent’s units in the path or directly on an NPC unit called the Tome Keeper.

Editor’s Note: Tome Keeper not to be confused with Dome Keeper

At the end of a player’s turn, the Tome Keeper moves towards specific locations. If there are units in its way, the Tome Keeper knocks them out, and the player who didn’t control those units scores points. Units that get knocked out can be replaced at the start of the next player’s turn.

There’s a fair amount to the movement and action system, and how it plays with the game’s upgrade choices that I don’t think I can summarize effectively, so I won’t try. It’s a perfectly fine system, but I would not describe it as “Sparking Joy,” at least for me.

It is worth noting that each player will be playing a different faction, with unique abilities and so keeping track of what your opponent can do is necessary to succeed.

I only played one game of Mythic Mischief, and it was a combination of a demo and an ass beating. I wouldn’t say that I hugely enjoyed it. That might have been because I lost, and because I get salty easily. But I also struggled with two other factors.

First up, just because of how the game works with scoring, it felt very difficult to make any sort of comeback once I fell behind. Secondly, the game reminded me of Chess in that it felt like a game of trying to find the “Correct” moves, and like a puzzle of chaining things together. That’s just not something I find very fun.

So yeah, if you do like deterministic movement games, or things like Chess, maybe you’ll get more out of Mythic Mischief than I did.

Klask

Klask is a manual dexterity game by Mikkel Bertelsen.

Honestly, it feels weird to be reviewing Klask here. It’s as if for some reason I felt compelled to write a review of Skeeball, or Soccer. The closest games I can think of as a comparison to Klask would be Air Hockey or maybe Foosball.

Those chips look really good.

All of this to say that the “Manual Dexterity” part of the game is absolutely not optional. Klask is played in an elevated square wooden box with sides. Each player has a magnet with a stick in the end that they hold under the box, and a pawn they place on top. The top pawn is moved by dragging it with the magnet from under the box.

The pawn and stick aren’t the only magnetic pieces, though. Klask also has 3 small plastic beads with magnets in the center that are placed equidistant in the middle of the playfield at the start of a point. These beads will jump and stick to your pawn if you get too close, and if 2 of the 3 stick to a player’s pawn, their opponent gets a point.

Points can also be scored by a player hitting the ball into the goal indent on the board, or if a player messes up and gets their pawn stuck in the indent.

The interesting part of Klask for me is how the tiny white beads open up strategy. Without them, the game is pretty much just air hockey with a marble. But with the beads, you can do interesting stuff like hitting them towards your opponent in order to close off parts of the board.

Overall, I like Klask. I just don’t like it enough to really want to buy it. That said, if someone asked me if I’d play, my response would be a semi-enthusiastic “Sure!”

Conclusion

I don’t think there’s any meaningful conclusion you can take out of things like both Klask and Mythic Mischief being present at PAX Unplugged. Maybe there’s some sort of testament to the diversity of mechanics and games present. Maybe there’s something to be said for the sorts of games you’d play if someone else is footing the bill.

And maybe there’s nothing. Maybe there is no purpose. Maybe the real journey was the friends we made along the way.

If you want more nonsense and to be notified whenever I write new stuff, maybe consider following me on Twitter? The site still seems to be up and functioning, at least for now.

Marvel Snap and the Inherent Unfairness of Card Games

Marvel Snap can be random and unfair. Personally, I think that’s a good thing. Here’s why.

I started this as Marvel Snap Week, but now it’s Marvel Snap Weeks, because I didn’t get these posts finished in time. You can read part 1 and part 2 here.

Let’s talk about something that everyone knows, but nobody really says out loud. Okay, nobody except game designers. They say it, but no one else does. Game designers and… Maxamillion Pegasus from Yu-Gi-Oh. Who, in-universe is a game designer, so I guess it’s still all game designers. Anyway.

This is the ideal game designer. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

Card games are not balanced. They are not inherently fair. In a game between two players, the strongest player won’t always win. The strongest deck won’t always win.

This isn’t a design flaw. Allowing weaker or unskilled players to beat stronger or higher skilled players is intentional.

Marvel Snap’s mechanics lean into this in several ways, both with card effects and core gameplay. But they also offer an out, allowing players on the receiving end of the RNG stick a way to minimize losses.

So let’s talk about Marvel Snap’s gameplay for the first time in this short series, and how it handles both having a wide variety of RNG, and controlling RNG’s effects.

Marvel Snap is played with a deck of 12 cards over 6 turns. Each card starting in a deck must be unique. Players draw 4 cards to start, and an additional card each turn. Cards have a cost and power. The cost is energy, and has to be paid to play the card. You start at one energy, and get an additional energy each turn. Leftover energy doesn’t carry over.

The game itself is played across 3 locations. To win, you just have to have the most power at two of the three locations when the game ends. Each player can only play 4 cards at any location. In case of ties, whoever has the most total power wins.

Locations are where the RNG first comes into play. There’s a fairly wide pool of locations, and when a game starts, three are randomly selected and placed face down. A single location is flipped face up when the game starts, and additional locations are flipped on turn 2 and turn 3. Locations can have a wide range of effects. Some buff or debuff units played on them, while others might give additional energy, or create copies of cards at random locations. One location will even play your cards for you. (And he’ll do it very badly, screw you Ego The Living Planet.)

Locations provide a huge amount of variance. Playing to an unrevealed location can be a big gamble. Sure, it might be the location that gives a free 6 drop if you fill it first, but it might be the location swaps the units located there to the opposing player after turn 3.

And this just the start of things that can randomly go wrong. There are plenty of cards with semi-random effects, or that can pull random cards into your hand or from your deck. In short, there’s a lot of space to “lose to” RNG.

The thing about Marvel Snap, though, is that losses and wins are not created equal. Let’s talk about the “Snap” system.

There is no unranked mode in Marvel Snap. Every mode is ranked, and in every game, you’re competing for cosmic cubes. The wager starts at one cosmic cube, and if the game reaches the last turn, the wager is doubled to 2 cubes. That’s if the game reaches the last turn, though, because both players can retreat at anytime. Retreating counts as a loss, but in exchange, you only lose cubes you’d already wagered.

But while you can retreat, you can also choose to snap. Snapping doubles the number of cubes staked, and you can only do it once per match. Your opponent can also choose to snap.

In a normal game, you’ll generally lose win or lose 1-2 cubes. But if both you and your opponent end the game confident you can crush the other player, the amount can go up to 4-8 cubes. And I think this mechanic, where players can state their confidence (and bluff) about whether they’re going to win is part of what balances out RNG. You’re likely to get lucky and unlucky in generally even amounts in the long run. But if you push when you’re winning, and retreat when you think you’re going to lose, you’ll come out ahead.

Players can always retreat, and simply take a one-cube loss. Choosing to push into poor situations with higher losses is an active decision you choose to make. There’s no “I have to play it out” mentality where every game is equal. If you’re doing badly, you can surrender and minimize the pain of RNG.

As a brief side note, I think it’s also interesting that retreating is displayed with the message “You Retreated” and a friendly color scheme, while losses use a harsh aggressive red. There’s a definite goal of making retreating feel like a smart choice and a good option.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say about Marvel Snap and RNG for the moment. Come back later this week, for part 4 of Marvel Snap Week(s), where we’ll talk about convergent game design, and wrap this series up. Or follow me on Twitter to see when that post goes up.

Marvel Snap and Dark Patterns

Marvel Snap has its fair share of dark patterns and skeezy progression design. Let’s talk about them for a bit.

Welcome back! It’s time for part two of Marvel Snap Week! Did anyone who worked on the game see part 1 and think “Wow, that review is positive,” or “He’s an illiterate hack, but at least he appreciates the game?” Well now it’s time to get rid of those nice feelings.

Mobile games are unique in that they’re the only platform where the games are usually “Free,” but have the potential to end up costing you more than a full ticket to Disney Land. As a result, the only sane approach is to enter with caution. They’re the only games I engage with while actively looking for a reason to NOT play them.

When a game is “Free,” you should always keep in mind panel 2 of XKCD #870.

Just replace “typeset” with “Spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop and put on the app store.”

To be honest, Marvel Snap isn’t that bad. It wouldn’t rank anywhere in my list of worst video game business models. But not being at the bottom of the barrel shouldn’t be the standard for this stuff. So let’s talk about Marvel Snap’s prices, the concept of dark patterns of design, and how the bar for mobile games is so unbelievably low that something like Marvel Snap seems “Fine.”

Let’s start with pricing. Marvel Snap currently sells two objects. Battlepasses, and Gold. Battlepasses work like most battlepasses in games do, but they can only be bought with real money for about $8. Complete quests that unlock over time to earn battlepass experience points. Level up the battlepass to get additional resources. It’s a fairly standard design, even if it does reinforce a lot of the dark patterns we’ll be talking about later. If you pay the $8 you get some gold, extra resources, and special card styles and avatars.

Now let’s talk about gold, and how Marvel Snap’s progression and collection works, because it’s a bit more insidious.

Marvel Snap has a very unique design for its progression system, one that I’ve actually never seen used before. Instead of opening booster packs to get cards, or pulling from boxes, or having a wildcard system, Marvel Snap has a single value for your collection level.

Your collection level increases as you acquire new cards, and level up your cards. As you travel along the collection level track, there’s a variety of rewards, and some of those rewards are mystery cards. What the game doesn’t really ever tell you, though, is that those mystery cards aren’t random. Instead, they’re random from a pool, and removed once you get them. So as your collection level goes from 1-216, you’ll unlock cards from pool 1. And once you reach 216, you’ll have unlocked them all, and you’ll move onto pool 2. This part is reasonable.

What’s not is how the tracker changes.

As you travel down the collection level, the amount of levels you need to unlock a new card starts to shift. First it’s every 4 levels. Then every 8 levels. I’m currently collection level 358 and I unlock a new card every 12 levels.

This means that even if you play the game the same amount every day, you’re going to start making progress far, far slower. This is because gaining card level comes from upgrading cards, which requires two resources: boosters and credits. And while technically boosters are a limiting reagent, you can get them fairly easily by playing games. Credits are limited by daily quests.

Guess what they sell in the cash shop for gold?

So if two players play, and one spends money, and the other doesn’t, the one spending money will progress their collection faster. This, combined with the fact that your progression is designed to get slower over time, feels scummy. They claim, “You can’t pay to win.” And technically, that’s true. But you absolutely can pay to speed up your collection progress.

Oh, also. The game sells alt-art styles for cards at between $10-$20 in fake in game money. Yes, the expensive art alt styles are 1200 gold. And yes, the closest purchase in gold to buy those styles is $20. So it counts as $20. Skim is a real trick.

Man, I’ve written like a page, and I haven’t even gotten to the game’s dark patterns. There’s nothing super egregious here, but they use a lot of the standard stuff. Daily quests force you to play daily. Limited-time battlepasses make you grind. The aforementioned bullshit where the in-game currency that you purchase is always just a bit more than the expensive item’s cost, so that there’s always some leftovers.

All of this sucks, because Marvel Snap is actually quite fun to play. And that’s what we’ll be talking about tomorrow.